Rethinking military training: Understanding civilian behaviour in combat is a capability
Guest blog by Naomi Hulme, Chief Executive Officer and Founder of Skyral Defence
Ask any soldier about their training and they'll describe weeks of combat drills, marksmanship practice, and tactical manoeuvres. They'll tell you about enemy contact drills, fire and movement, and target engagement.
What they rarely mention is learning how a panicked family will respond when fighting erupts on their street, where frightened civilians will seek cover, or how to predict the chaotic flow of people fleeing an engagement area.
We need to train for new variables.
Some of the most dangerous and consequential moments in modern warfare involve not how enemies behave, but how terrified civilians physically react in combat environments.
This gap between traditional training and reality creates dangerous situations that no amount of marksmanship can solve.
Modern warfare demands agility, cohesion, and interoperability, all of which are forged in training environments that replicate the complexity of today’s battlefields. The UK and NATO possess extraordinary experience and technological advantage, but their training infrastructure must now evolve to match the pace and scope of current threats.
As RUSI pointed out last year, training must no longer be the overlooked component of defence. Rather, it must sit at the heart of strategy and resourcing.
Synthetic environments, multinational exercises, and integrated digital systems offer tremendous potential to transform how UK and NATO forces prepare. RAND's analysis into UK and NATO joint doctrine revealed the challenge lies in ensuring soldiers, sailors, and aircrew are exposed to the kinds of high-intensity, multi-domain scenarios they are likely to face.
Scaling up both live and virtual training will not only enhance readiness but build trust and cohesion across the Alliance. This is a realistic and achievable goal if it achieves the right investment and focus.
Western militaries excel at predicting enemy manoeuvres and engaging hostile forces. What we struggled with until recently is anticipating civilian behaviour under fire; where people will run, how crowds will move when ordnance starts flying, which buildings people will shelter in, and how quickly streets will fill or empty when fighting begins.
These physical realities increasingly determine whether operations succeed without catastrophic civilian casualties.
The challenge isn't acknowledging that civilians exist in battlespaces - commanders understand this well. The challenge is training forces to predict and account for civilian physical behaviour as precisely as they predict enemy movements.
This is where synthetic training environments offer transformative potential. The technology exists to create virtual worlds populated not with static civilian markers, but with populations that move, react, and behave with realistic human complexity.
At Skyral, we've developed pattern-of-life modelling that populates entire synthetic environments with individual civilian agents who follow daily routines, make decisions under stress, and physically respond to danger in unpredictable but authentic ways.
During pathfinder work with the British Army, we discovered something critical: when soldiers train in environments where civilians move and react realistically, they learn to think operationally in entirely new ways.
They begin calculating not just angles of fire and enemy positions, but civilian flow patterns and likely panic behaviours.
This shift is profound. In our synthetic environments, soldiers can witness how contact near a marketplace causes crowds to scatter in multiple directions, some directly into danger. They observe how civilians sheltering in basements during urban combat can become trapped when buildings are damaged.
They learn that the timing of an operation fundamentally changes civilian density and movement patterns. They can experiment with different tactical approaches and observe the physical consequences for nearby populations in real-time.
Consider a typical urban engagement scenario: a patrol receives contact in a residential area. In traditional training, success means suppressing enemy fire and manoeuvring to a position of advantage.
During our British Army pathfinder work, we observed soldiers grappling with scenarios where technically sound decisions created civilian catastrophes. These weren't tactical failures, they were failures to account for humans under stress.
This is a story about giving soldiers a new capability – the soldier who can predict civilian movement patterns is better prepared for actual combat. It’s also a rare defence story that focuses on saving lives rather than taking them.
Our adversaries often seek to exploit civilian presence—initiating contact in crowded areas, using civilian movement patterns as cover, counting on our restraint in complex environments.
The technology to address this exists now. Synthetic environments can model realistic population densities, movement patterns, and stress responses. They can simulate how different demographics behave under threat—families with children move differently than young men, elderly populations shelter differently than mobile ones. They can replicate the physics of crowds, the patterns of panic, and the practical reality that civilians in danger don't behave predictably.
Digital training systems predict civilian movement and casualties as meticulously as enemy positions. After-action reviews examine whether tactical decisions accounted for predictable civilian patterns.
The UK's £400m Innovation Fund and enhanced UK-EU security partnerships offer opportunities to prioritise training systems that model realistic civilian behaviour in combat environments.
Success depends not just on defeating enemies, but on operating effectively in environments where civilians are present, mobile, and unpredictable.
The soldier who can predict civilian movement patterns and account for them tactically is better prepared for actual combat. That's not constraint—it's capability. And it's what tomorrow's warfare demands.
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Authors
Naomi Hulme
CCO and Co-Founder , Skyral
